Special Stones

    Keywords: Rules

Once I played a game against a 9 kyu in our club, with whom the handicap usually varies between 5 and 7 stones. He took Black and no handicap but had two special stones. One, marked with a triangle, when played, enabled him to play once more before White's turn. The other stone, marked with two eyes, did what it appeared to do: it was alive.

He thought that either of them already made up for the handicap, but I thought that I could even deal with giving him a living group and two moves in a row.

How wrong I was. What I had severely underestimated was the power of the threat of those stones, without them being actually played. I found myself playing so conservatively, that at some stage, he was getting ahead before having played any of his special stones. So I started playing more aggressively, but in the middle of a fight, he cut off my pivotal stones with his two-eyed stone, and I resigned at the sight of two consective moves capturing my large group.

While Black can simply play proper Go, White has to play counterintuitively and anticipate a large loss at any time of the game. It is not really a good exercise to learn Go, but it is lots of fun. We haven't repeated the experience since.

Dieter Verhofstadt


Some other ideas for special stones:

Illich: What about these special stones:

KarlKnechtel: This has set my mind in motion for sure - how about DominGo, where all stones are 2x1? Tetris stones seem a big too chunky for this sort of play, but 2x1 stones have some interesting properties.

Some ideas for play:

(This would be difficult to do with tetris stones, no? Maybe draw the shape on the stone, and when it is played the player adds three normal stones to complete the shape.)

KarlKnechtel: "scenarios" are worth combining with unusual gobans representing world maps... you could recreate historical battles (I'm imagining a "Plough salt into the ground stone", which when played removes orthogonal stones from play along with the intersections themselves, and which remains alive as a special provision since it can't be surrounded - maybe you could get one as a bonus for capturing a one-eyed group?), or concoct some fantasy setting (black and white stones seem perfect for Orcs vs. Elves!).


[ext] http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/pieces.htm has further ideas for special stones.


This is a copy of the living page "Special Stones" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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